ISF Podcast S36 Ep22: Rainer Hersch - The Sound of Leadership: What Orchestras can Teach Modern Business Teams
Mar 17, 2026
18:39
In this week’s episode, Steve sits down with conductor, pianist, comedian, and broadcaster Rainer Hersch. Rainer leans on his orchestra experience to explain how leaders outside the concert hall can build deep trust and strike a balance between discipline and adaptability in a rapidly changing world. He also reveals his secret leadership weapon: humor.
Key Takeaways:
- Conducting an orchestra has many parallels to leading a business.
- Not every team member must know the entire business, but the leaders do.
- Good conducting—and by extension, good leadership—is a back-and-forth effort between leaders and those being led.
Tune in to hear more about:
- How conductors make different parts of the orchestra function in harmony (1:53)
- Flexibility in an orchestra and in business (6:59)
- How Hersch uses humor in his work as a conductor (14:54)
Standout Quotes:
- “These analogies are very similar to how any large organization works. The only person actually who's got the kind of blueprint for the product that the orchestra is presenting to its customers, that is the orchestra score, is the conductor. Everybody else has just got their individual parts of the project. So coming together in that way musically, well, requires listening, it requires following in certain occasions, leading in others.” - Rainer Hersch
- “The conductor is the person who's given that one job of examining this plain piece of writing and going, okay, this is what is intended, this is the emotion that is intended. And in order to bring that emotion out, we need to do this in a certain way, and inspiring and motivating everybody else to participate in that irrespective of how they would personally go about it.” - Rainer Hersch
- “There are mistakes that happen in a performance, and I'm not going to stop every single mistake and go, ‘Duh-uh, bar 24 flutes.’ No. There are some things that happen, I know they will be fixed by the individual players. In a rehearsal, something happens, they miss the queue. I'll say, that'll be all right in the performance, won't it? Yes, it will. They've seen that I've seen it, and that's enough for them.” - Rainer Hersch
Read the transcript of this episode
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